Southern California Linux Expo 7x (SCALE)

This weekend (Feb 20-22) is the 7th Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). This is a terrific community-centric event held at the LAX Westin in Los Angeles every year. Get registered now and reserve your hotel room before it's too late! If you work with Open Source, you'll be glad you attended this conference. SCALE has become a larger show with more corporate sponsors, but still retains the community organiza

This weekend (Feb 20-22) is the 7th Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). This is a terrific community-centric event held at the LAX Westin in Los Angeles every year. Get registered now and reserve your hotel room before it's too late! If you work with Open Source, you'll be glad you attended this conference.

SCALE has become a larger show with more corporate sponsors, but still retains the community organization touches that make it special. There are some great classes and presenters, including AEleen Frisch of O'Reilly's Essential Systems Administration fame. There will be over 60 speakers and presenters talking about Open Source topics at this weekend's event.

The League of Professional System Administrators is putting on the SCALE University classes on Friday. Classes include topics like virtualized storage management, disaster recovery, and Fedora's Directory Server. At only $300, this is a good deal.

As always with SCALE, there is a mix of community and non-profit organizations along with the paid corporate exhibitors. Have a look at the full list of exhibitors, and you'll find some of the big names like IBM, Dell, Splunk, and RedHat. But there are also our favorite non-profits such as Debian, Coreboot, Gnome, and KDE.

I'm excited to be going back again this year, and I'll have updates about the latest and greatest in the world of Open Source in the coming week.

Brian Chee is a senior contributing editor to InfoWorld reviews and the founder and manager of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawai'i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.